ABSTRACT
Reason, and more precisely human reason, is the power that generates science and in doing philosophy reflects upon its own activity and accomplishments. This general claim may be taken as framing both Kant’s and Hegel’s consideration of what science is and ought to be. In their account, Wissenschaft is identified, first and foremost, through its rational source, since the source determines both science’s methodology, its problems and procedures, and the extent and legitimacy of its practices. Under this premise, the question of what counts as scientific experience and of how scientific experience is produced out of that source is the problem that both Kant and Hegel immediately link to the determination of the nature and structures of rationality. While for Kant reason is still conceived as a subjective ‘faculty’ or ‘capacity’ (Vermögen) whose correct and justified exercise or ‘use’ (Gebrauch) is responsible for the institution of scientific cognition, Hegel identifies reason with the actual realization of rational activity: rationality is not just a form of cognition (theoretical or practical), but an immanent and objective dimension of reality itself; reason is not a set of pre-conditions to knowledge, but the dimension of reality in its actual processuality. In this sense, for Hegel, reason is indeed ab-soluta from all dependency on a finite human subject. Reason becomes the dimension of the ‘absolute method’ that constitutes Wissenschaft as such. Despite this fundamental difference, however, both for Kant and for Hegel the philosophical account of the structures of rationality must take on the form of a complete and concluded system of fundamental forms and functions that, as categories of the understanding in transcendental logic and as pure forms of thinking in speculative logic, normatively permeate all successful endeavor in doing science.
